Authors: Andy Oakes
A man so big standing up, so small in the tuck of the bed. Seemingly so fragile in the handshake of starched cotton sheets and medical ritual. The tears cutting down his cheeks … looking as if they might wash him away.
Yaobang’s arm stretched out, straining on the drip. They touched hands … flesh upon flesh.
“Save the bastards for me when you find them, Boss. They’ve killed my brother. The fuckers. They’ve killed my little brother.”
*
It was cold as he left the hospital. A bitterness about it that chilled the soul. Piao reached to his jacket collar to fasten it. The button was missing. Who was there to sew a new one on?
As if a crumbling tooth had been extracted, the dark gap filled the
Kung an chu
… taking up most of the second floor. The Computer Centre … now a ransacked hole. Amputated truncking, stripped conduit, sprouting cables bleeding copper. And against each roughly hewn wall, grey cabinet against grey cabinet … dented, chipped tinplate. Each spewing thick plaits of wiring. Gaping innards of vacuum tubes. On the floor surrounding the obsolete main frame computer … a fine dusting of powdered glass. A seedling scatter of delicate filament wire. And through the only window, a light so weak that it died without reflection across the floor in front of the Senior Investigator’s feet.
At the centre of the space that Piao no longer recognised, an island of dark grey workstations spotlit … new, protective plastic sheeting still covering their flanks. A thick umbilical cord of bundled wiring snaking from the innards of the VDUs and keyboards. One disappearing down a roughly chiselled hole in the concrete some metres away. The other, to a two metre high sentry of grey sculptured steel. A single flash of red holed by a chrome lock. A logo picked out in white lines …
IBM
. The workstations were empty except for one man, his face dominated by over large spectacles. As Piao drew closer, also came the smells. Smells of a thick wallet, filled with illicit yuan notes. Smells of the heat of a man’s body through pure cotton … and the breaths that concentration brings. Short, stale … hardly breathed at all.
“Welcome to my new kingdom Sun Piao.”
Rentang, known to all in the Kung an chu as, ‘The Wizard’, turned slowly in his swivel chair. The man revealed. Pallid. Mean featured. Not a wizard at all … just a man. A man who was good, very good with computers. Piao lit a Panda Brand and, through the smoke, looked around.
“The old main frame was stripped out a month ago. It was a first generation electronic computer … American, Sperry Rand. It weighed over thirty tons and all that it had was the computing capacity of a five hundred dollars personal computer of today …”
He laughed. A laugh as generous as a chicken carcass. And all the time, his fingers across the keyboard in a precise ballet. The VDUs fever across his spectacles.
“… it never worked anyway. For the last fifteen years we’ve been mainly dependant on manual filing systems for the retrieval of information. A city with modern crime and a basement full of ancient filing cabinets …”
Nodding toward the sentinel of grey steel.
“… now we have a new American baby. An IBM S/390 Parallel Enterprise Server, Generation 3. It weighs just nine hundred and thirty-eight kilos and takes up two square metres. It can feed a console on every desk, in every
Pai chu so
in the city with the details of any criminal and dissident in the Republic within the time that it takes to say ‘filing cabinet’.”
He stroked the screen of the VDU, almost breathless. Rainbow pixels haemorrhaging blurred across his bitten nails.
“… a sweet, plump American baby. It can do anything that we want it to and won’t shit in its pants”
Piao dropped the cigarette butt to the cold concrete, his foot coming down upon it. Death throes of smoke winding around his shoe.
“Anything?”
Rentang swivelled his chair, removing his glasses and revealing eyes of black with nothing in them.
“You want something of me Investigator. Something that will pay back the favours that I owe to you.”
Piao pulled out the envelope from the inside of his jacket; the five full frame monochrome prints scattered onto the desk. Smashed, broken faces. Bone, blood. And seeming to pin each face … craters that held no eyes, bleeding, weeping mud.
“You’re supposed to be a wizard. Give them back their faces.”
*
The wizard with vomit on his breath returned from the toilet, fingers still dabbing at a stain on his tie. Tears pressed into the corners of his eyes. He stabbed a finger at the prints.
“Give me some warning next time, yes, Investigator? Unlike you, we’re not all used to seeing the fruits that the Homicide Squad feeds off.”
Fruits that the Homicide Squad feeds off
… an unusual phrase to describe such a harvest of tortured, dead bodies. Piao suddenly thought of overripe avocados. Halved and mashed melons. Squashed and pitted lychee.
“A warning. What, a day, a year, ten years?”
Rentang would get nothing from this conversation. He put a peppermint in his mouth. The taste of bile fading slowly from his tongue. Sitting at the workstation, an unbearable urge to rip off his tie, discard it and have a shower.
“So, you want me to give them back their faces. Is that all?”
“And run them through your new toy. I need to know who they are.”
“And who are they, Sun Piao … Politicals, non-conformists, dissidents? There’s no security involvement here, is there?”
The wizard’s eyebrows, a tight slipknot of concern.
“They’re just the fruits that the Homicide Squad feeds off. Can you do it?”
Rentang’s finger traced the outlines of the monochrome faces.
“See the angles of the jaws, the lack of definition, the misalignments … all would suggest severe damage to the skeletal structure. The mandible, body and ramus. Damage to the temporal bone also, as high as the zygomatic frontal process. On some, the noses seem completely unsupported due to crushing or splintering of the maxilla and nasal bone. Some of them have collapsed completely into an enlarged anterior nasal aperture. And damage to the frontal bones of the skulls is quite marked and severe, in some cases as deep as the lesser wing of the sphenoid, the superior orbital fissure and the optic canal. They did a good job on them; their skulls are jigsaw pieces. What was used?”
Through the smoke of a new cigarette … “A club hammer has been suggested.”
Piao remembering the colours in the mud. Hard, harsh in camera flash. Bone, so white. Gash and gouge, so black. The Senior Investigator drew deeply on the butt, forcing the memories away. Rentang turned. The smile on his face, a paper cut.
“You seem surprised at my knowledge of human anatomy, Sun Piao. It’s nice to rock a Senior Investigator back on his heels. I trained as a doctor for three years.”
“Why change, you sound as if you were a promising student?”
“You’re correct, Senior Investigator, I was a very promising student. But a doctor, I ask you, would I have made a doctor? No, no … it was once a ‘fat job’, but not now. But this …”
He stroked his fingers across the VDU screen. A paleness. A stark skeletal quality about them that reminded Piao of a river crab.
“… computers. Now this is a fat job. One of the fattest.”
The Senior Investigator leant forward.
“Remember, I know just how ‘fat’ your job is and how fat you have become in it …”
Closer, closer, the smell of bile on his breath as sweet as toffee apples and Guerlain on a warm summer’s evening.
“… don’t tell me about jigsaw pieces. Can you give them back their faces?”
“Their faces. Yes. I will have to brush up on my anatomy, and there is a professor in the Institute Medical School who has a reputation for rebuilding the fragments of skulls found in archaeological excavations. A strange way to spend your evenings, but it could be of use to us especially in the restoration of the structural damage …”
He must have seen the question in Piao’s eyes.
“… and of course I will be discreet. I know how to be very discreet …”
Rentang smiled, as reassuring as a snake draped around your neck.
“… I do a little freelance work for some of the other Security Bureaus, most of it to do with the preparation of cases against suspected dissidents. Some of it a little more political. Fat cadre jockeying for even fatter jobs. Mostly image manipulation, placing people next to other people in photographs, people who they had rather not be associated with. Putting them in places that they should not be. Putting them in, what should we say … indiscreet situations? Anything can be done to an image nowadays. It’s become rather a speciality of mine …”
Again, the smile.
“… I use a Macintosh PC with a world standard photo design software package. We could use the Layer Mask facility to anatomically reconstruct, to the professor’s instructions, the skull and facial bone damage … and then lay muscle and flesh across this without destroying the original image data. Plus it also has ninety-five special effects filters that I can use to sharpen, style, or remove blemishes from the image.”
“Meaning what?”
Piao almost spat the words … drowning in the sea of technobabble that seemed to be the common denominator among every computer expert that he had ever met.
“Meaning that you will get your faces Senior Investigator.”
The VDU faded grey. Pixels imploding to form a silver star at its heart.
“And what we will get will be realistic, accurate?”
“Yes. But of course we will never know the true colour of their eyes …”
Lazy figures of eight. Rentang’s index finger tracing around the monochrome, empty eye sockets.
“… you can’t have what you never had Sun Piao. And talking about having, what is it that I get out of all of this?”
The Senior Investigator was already making for the exit, the blind-eyed reflection of the monitors tracking his shortening frame.
“What you get is my amnesia. My continued amnesia.”
Rentang shouted …
“Investigator, you’re fucking with me. You’re cutting my legs off.”
His reply was only a whisper as he moved into the corridor, but Piao was sure that the wizard would hear it. He did.
“Every cripple finds his own way of walking.”
*
The car sat on wasteland behind the Nanjing Road, once the spilling rears, the working entrails of restaurants, tailors, bakers; now home to western named shops. Gucci … Pucci. Gold blocked letters growing from marble. Cool neon blues spilling onto pavements. Their backsides wiped clean and as pristine as their grey minimalist shop spaces. Garbage bins with names on. Loading bays whitewashed and swept clean.
*
A shaft of sunlight skewered the car against the far wall. A slither of sharp edged yellow-white slicing against dirty paintwork and across Barbara’s face. She brushed her hair, eyes lightly closed. The sun lazily warm. It could have been California, or Tampa offseason. She opened her eyes as Piao slammed the car door shut, still brushing her hair. But it was Shanghai.
“He’ll help, this computer whiz?”
Her hair was gold. Piao’s gaze returned to the road; a photograph being summoned up from his childhood. The only photograph that he had ever seen of his father. Such golden hair. His father. The stranger. The man who had screwed his mother.
“Golden hair,” he breathed, as a taxi sounded its horn and let him become a part of the swollen wave of traffic moving north up Xixanglu, past the Park of the People.
“Excuse me?”
Barbara’s face tilted gently towards him.
‘
Golden hair … a little piece of heaven, a little piece of hell.’
“The Bureau’s computer expert, if he cannot give the dead back their faces, nobody can,” Piao said, as the road tumbled between cliff faces of offices once more. The sun’s edge dulled. The colour of her hair turning from gold to tarnished brass.
*
The buildings that made up Fudan University sat like so many discarded shoe boxes … hemmed in by clipped lawns cut into jigsaw pieces by a web of narrow concrete paths. At the intersections nearest the buildings, policemen stood; olive green uniforms mimicking the grass in shadow. From a distance they could have been mistaken for bushes growing out of the cold concrete base.
“Why so many police?”
Piao reluctantly returned a salute as they neared building Number 4. A banner, red on white, draped above the double doors, stating, in Mao’s own words uttered at the outset of the Cultural Revolution, that …
Youth must be put to the test.
It had been hurriedly erected, paint still wet and running into drips. The Senior Investigator smiled, reaching up to pull the banner to one side … the gauze on his fingers bleeding red paint. He translated the graffiti that lay underneath it on the brickwork. Red on brown. More words from Mao’s lips, the dictum …
To rebel is justified.
“Mao is elastic, he is used in a similar way to your Bible. His words can be used to support any argument.”
The Senior Investigator said only one more word to Barbara before they were met by a university official, who would escort them to the office and laboratory area that had once been the domain of Professor Lazarus Heywood.
“ Tiananmen.”
Barbara nodded. It explained everything.
*
“I told you. Expect little or nothing.”
The large space was stripped totally bare, cleaned, repainted. It was dark, no windows. Lit only by two gently swaying yellowed bulbs hanging from ceiling cords, giving the room a sense of gentle movement, as if it were adrift on a great and deep swell of ocean. Barbara moved to the centre of the space, her shadows lengthening and shortening on alternate walls.
“Is this it? You said that it was a laboratory and also Heywood’s office.”
“It was.”
Piao joined her, his eyes not leaving hers.
“This was also where your son would have worked.”
She turned away unable to speak, her eyes lost to Piao. The official shuffling forward in shoes that were shiny, but which pinched, as Piao circled and re-circled him.